Oddball

Is R. A. Dickey too good to be true?

“It doesn’t have as much time to flutter out of the zone,” Dickey says of his knuckleball. Its speed makes it more controllable.Credit Photograph by Dylan Coulter

R. A. Dickey, the reigning National League Cy Young Award winner, sometimes seems like a sports hero dreamed up by a bookworm. He is a knuckleball pitcher, already the most ungainly of athletic specialists, relying on physics to make jocks look foolish. He wears his brown hair shaggy in the back, and has a beard that would please a thru-hiker. In 2011, inspired by Hemingway, he climbed Mt. Kilimanjaro—Kili, he calls it—and blogged about it for the New York Times. (“I take solace at least in the awareness of my own bravado.”) Every celebrity has a charitable cause, but, this past winter, Dickey actually travelled to the red-light district of Mumbai in support of his: curbing sex trafficking in India. He wrote about that for the Daily News: “It made me want to grab every downtrodden person I could find and walk them through the door, into the light and possibility, beyond the vile and violent world they’ve grown so accustomed to.” In spite of his millions, Dickey also professes to love public transportation, which he uses to visit museums in cities like Philadelphia, San Francisco, and Washington, D.C., on the days he’s not pitching. “I mean, I figure, why not, you know?” he told me, in a Tennessee drawl. “I love art.” Dickey is impossible not to admire, yet one can’t help but wonder about those who embrace him too readily, now that they’ve seen him self-deprecating with Jon Stewart on “The Daily Show.” Are they even baseball fans, or do they just find it comforting to know that not all exceptional athletes are as boring as Derek Jeter or as vain as Alex Rodriguez?

Conspicuous cosmopolitanism can be its own form of vanity, especially in a sport with a culture as lethargic as baseball’s. “Hurry up and wait,” baseball people sometimes joke, about the preponderance of downtime that overwhelms their daily professional lives. Instead of embracing multitasking, the game’s unwritten code seems to frown on it, and makes a virtue of enduring long afternoons between stretching and shagging fly balls with little more than sunflower seeds and headphones as distractions. In a losing clubhouse, at least, extracurricular activity is cause for suspicion, and, shortly before the Mets traded Dickey, last December, a column appeared in the Post accusing him of being a glory hound. Dickey was engaged in negotiations about his contract with the club. He was due to be paid five million dollars in 2013—good money, to be sure, but a pittance for a twenty-game winner—and his agent was seeking an extension, and a raise, to capitalize on his client’s newfound status, at age thirty-eight, as one of the game’s élite players. The column’s author, Ken Davidoff, mocked Dickey’s infatuation with his own “narrative,” and accused him of being needy—“a handful”—and unloved by his less worldly teammates.

The precipitating event for this zinger was a holiday party that the team had organized, at Citi Field, to benefit victims of Hurricane Sandy. Whether or not Dickey was admired by his peers, he was, after three seasons on the roster, undeniably popular among Mets fans, a lone bright spot in the grim years that followed the near-bankrupting of the franchise owing to the owner’s investments with Bernie Madoff. Dickey was asked to fly up from his home, in Nashville, to attend the party, playing the part of an elf. (Inevitably, a knuckleballer, even one who stands six feet two and weighs two hundred and fifteen pounds, would be cast as an elf.) There, also inevitably, reporters asked him about the status of his contract talks, and he took the opportunity to plead his case: he was old, yes, but well within a knuckleballer’s prime, and a bargain at a wage that was only slightly greater than the league average. “I feel like we’re asking for even less than what is fair,” Dickey said. “When people say, ‘It’s business, it’s not personal,’ that just means it’s not personal for them.” To Davidoff, at the Post, this was Dickey showing his “true character,” putting his own feelings above the mission of the team. The headline—“AMAZIN’S WON’T KNUCKLE UNDER DICKEY’S LAUGHABLE THREATS TO LEAVE”—gave the impression that the column’s author was serving as a mouthpiece for management, which appeared to be more interested in rebuilding for the future. Sure enough, in a matter of days, the Mets had found Dickey a new home, in Toronto.

“My first thought in my heart was: You need to apologize, R.A., for the place that you did that,” Dickey told me, the day after he’d passed his Blue Jays physical—“the day after all this crap,” as he put it, referring to the fallout from the Post column, and what he perceived as a hurtful smear campaign by the Mets, to placate a frustrated fan base. “Because I did it at a holiday party that was there to celebrate kids who had been displaced from Hurricane Sandy.”

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Dickey was back in Nashville, where strangers stopped him occasionally to offer congratulations: the Blue Jays had agreed not only to take on his contract but to extend it by two years and twenty-five million dollars—considerably more money than he had made in his entire career thus far. Yet as he drove around town, fielding calls from his agent (“Hey, did we put the shoe contract to bed?”) and ESPN (“It feels good to be wanted—my narrative is such that that hasn’t always been the case”), I got the sense that Dickey felt he’d earned a Pyrrhic victory. He’d loved his time in New York, a city that had bigger ambitions than baseball. “Seemingly, there was this culture where you could celebrate who you were authentically made to be,” he told me, and referred to the connections and friends he’d been able to make in the publishing and film industries while writing a best-selling book, “Wherever I Wind Up: My Quest for Truth, Authenticity, and the Perfect Knuckleball,” and participating in a documentary, “Knuckleball!,” that premièred at Tribeca last spring. “You get to celebrate that part of you that gets overshadowed, because ‘the game should just be the game,’ and you can’t operate outside that—you’re not a human.” He went on, “Now, it may have been more than what some people wanted. As far as the Mets were concerned, I don’t know.”

In “Wherever I Wind Up,” Dickey recounts an anecdote from his first day in the majors, when a veteran pitcher, instead of saying hello, kicked Dickey’s brown leather shoes into the middle of the clubhouse floor: “I guess my shoes were trespassing on his territory by a few inches.” What stuck with him was not just the hostile act but its routine nature—the fact that nobody else seemed to mind, or even notice. “Why do you need to have a certain amount of big-league time or a particular set of credentials to be treated like a human being?” he writes. “Some baseball customs are just plain absurd. And downright dumb.” He had resolved then to treat everyone with dignity, regardless of accomplishments on the field, and the notion that this might have been perceived as arrogance, that he wasn’t a good teammate, now stung. He noted that Ken Davidoff had felt compelled to write a follow-up column, defending his assertion but citing only anonymous sources, and Dickey couldn’t help wondering whose agenda was being served. “Wouldn’t it be great if people said what they really meant?” he asked.

Dickey drove past a sign advertising “Holistic Pet Care,” and his mood lifted. “I cannot believe there’s such a thing,” he said. “That’s awesome.” He mentioned that he’d been reading “The Master and Margarita,” by Mikhail Bulgakov, and wished that he’d found the time to study more Russian history, to appreciate the breadth of the novel. “I know there’s all kinds of metaphors that I’m missing,” he said. Soon, he arrived at his kids’ school, and joked about all the oversized vehicles in the parking lot, including his own Toyota Sequoia. He headed inside and returned a few minutes later with six-year-old Eli and nine-year-old Lila. Gabriel, his eleven-year-old daughter, was staying late for a theatre rehearsal. “Are you playing for the Blue Jays now?” Eli asked, evidently having learned of the big news from his classmates.

“I am, buddy,” Dickey said. “I am a Toronto Blue Jay.”

Lila ran off a list of baseball’s bird names—Blue Jays, Cardinals, Orioles—and then, after a pause, asked her father how many zeroes there were in a million.

I first noticed Dickey in 2004, while writing about the chief knuckleballer at the time, Boston’s Tim Wakefield. Dickey, then twenty-nine and pitching for the Texas Rangers, handed Wakefield his first loss of the season. It was a Sunday in early May, and the game was televised nationally, on ESPN. Dickey was still a so-called “conventional” pitcher, and an unheralded one, although he had a couple of notable quirks that lent some interest to the telecast. He lacked an ulnar collateral ligament in his right elbow, which meant that he was incapable of straightening it, or of bringing his hand up to touch his shoulder. And he threw a specialty pitch, on occasion, that served as a good advertisement for the effects of high-definition television, then a new treat. “It’s sick!” Theo Epstein, the Red Sox general manager, told me afterward. “It’s one-third knuckleball, one-third breaking ball, one-third split-finger.” Joe Morgan, the ESPN color analyst, called it “the Thing.”

The Thing, in fact, was just a speedy knuckleball—one that didn’t float so much as dart. It travelled at least ten miles an hour faster than Wakefield’s butterfly. “We never disputed the name, because we didn’t want people to think that the knuckleball was what I was throwing,” Dickey told me, revealing an initial preference for the allure of something more mysterious—a different species of bug. Unlike Wakefield, a converted infielder who had never had a particularly lively arm to begin with, Dickey was formerly known for his heat. In college, at the University of Tennessee, he once hit ninety-six on the radar gun, and he was encouraged to take out a million-dollar insurance policy on his arm from Lloyd’s of London. The Rangers drafted him in the first round. It was 1996, he had just finished his junior year, and he was headed to Atlanta to pitch in the Olympics. Baseball America put him and several other Team U.S.A. starters on the cover, and he was all set to sign for an eight-hundred-and-ten-thousand-dollar bonus. But when a Rangers trainer noticed the magazine photograph, in which Dickey’s arm was hanging at an unusual angle, he suggested that they take some X-rays as a precaution.

Dickey hadn’t known about his deformity, only that his flexion was more limited than most. If anything, this tightness had proved beneficial. He’d been a star high-school quarterback as well, and a capable shooting guard, attracting interest from college football and basketball coaches before he chose to pursue baseball exclusively. “It should hurt you to turn a doorknob,” a doctor now told him. Small consolation that it didn’t: the Rangers revoked their offer. Later, they gave him the option of signing for seventy-five thousand dollars. Unsure whether he’d get another chance, he withdrew from school and accepted the Rangers’ charity, using the money to settle some of his father’s debts, to pay off his insurance premium, and to buy an engagement ring for his girlfriend. It would be fifteen years before he earned as much in a season as appearing on the cover of Baseball America had cost him.

The missing ligament and the knuckleball habit are unrelated, but, as Dickey sees it, they map a long trajectory as an outlier. “I started in professional baseball as what people were calling a freak of nature, and, as a knuckleballer, you’re still in that category,” he said. He didn’t find success with the pitch until he had lost enough velocity on his fastball that a gimmick was his only option, and even then there were countless setbacks, enough to make a less adaptable man settle for the fleeting youthful stardom. Dickey was thirty, and down in AAA, with the Oklahoma City RedHawks, when he made the Thing his thing, in 2005. He gave up twelve runs and couldn’t finish the sixth inning his first time out. Still, he kept at it, and, the next spring, he began the season in Texas—where, in his first start, he tied a record for futility, surrendering six home runs to the Tigers before he was relieved, in the fourth. Back down he went.

The Rangers had had enough, and the Milwaukee Brewers offered him a shot—in the minors. While he was pitching for the Nashville Sounds, in 2007, his desperation reached the point of recklessness, and he attempted to swim across the Missouri River, wearing flip-flops from the gift shop of a casino hotel taped to his feet. (“Washington crossing the Delaware, Joshua crossing the Jordan, Perseus crossing the river Styx—I think of all these epic feats as I look at the river,” he later wrote.) He failed at that, too, and his teammates had to rescue him from drowning. But the muddy water seemed to have a cleansing effect—“like magic,” in his telling—and his performance improved markedly in the months that followed, enough so that the Seattle Mariners were willing to take the next chance on him. As a reliever and spot starter with the Mariners, in 2008, Dickey tied another record, this time for the most wild pitches in an inning.

It wasn’t yet a career, but Dickey knew then that he had the makings of a book, if nothing else. He’d rented a craftsman’s cottage overlooking Puget Sound, in Tacoma, not far from the Mariners’ AAA stadium. (He was wise enough not to count on remaining with the club in Seattle.) After long nights at the ballpark, he’d return home to an air mattress on the floor, where he’d sprawl out and write, attempting to explain his unusual perseverance by revisiting difficult events in his childhood, chief among them the multiple instances of sexual abuse he suffered.

Dickey’s mother drank heavily, and his father, a machine operator on a construction crew and a night watchman at the county juvie, was a distant figure. Their kitchen was stocked with flatware filched from Western Sizzlin. Often, at night, his mother went out, dropping him and his younger sister off with a babysitter, and, on several occasions, in the summer before Dickey started fourth grade, the sitter was a girl who was four or five years older and curious about her emerging sexuality. She treated Dickey like a doll, leading him to her bedroom and ordering him to disrobe. He still recalls the confusion of being banished to another room, as if in punishment, when she decided that she’d had enough.

Since coming forward with this story, Dickey has found that the babysitter’s transgressions don’t strike many people as abuse, in the conventional sense. On Twitter, he said, “People were like, ‘How can you be upset about having sex with a twelve-year-old when you’re eight? That’s most people’s dream!’ ” He wasn’t amused. “It’s so foreign to them,” he continued. “Your balls haven’t even dropped yet. You have no idea that that’s even part of the scope of what’s going on in the world.” His shame was such that he never told anyone about it until he was thirty-one.

In the fall of fourth grade, Dickey was visiting relatives in the countryside outside Nashville—“a place with farms and barns and one-room schoolhouses,” he wrote—and throwing a ball against the roof of a garage, when a teen-age boy approached and began unzipping his pants. Dickey tried to run, but the boy grabbed him. “When I realized what was happening, my eyes, you couldn’t have pried them open with a crowbar,” he said. “Did he have dark hair? Maybe. There’ve been times when I’ve tried to recall all the details, but it’s still hard.” He waited even longer, after revealing the babysitter’s violations, to mention this rape. “There was something about it being male-on-male,” he said.

Dickey sought relief from the “darkness,” as he put it, in books and sports, which turned out to be a productive outlet for channelling rage. “The symptoms that come out of being abused as a child often turn into the very same attributes that allow you to endure and grind it out on the field,” he told me, and said that he knows of two other professional ballplayers who shared similar backgrounds. “It wouldn’t surprise me if there are more.” But, as an otherwise highly functioning teen-ager, he would sometimes pretend to be homeless. His parents by then were divorced. His mother had gone into rehab, and he was ostensibly living with his father, whose aloofness inclined Dickey to seek alternatives. Claiming to be spending the night out with friends, he’d look up rental listings in the want ads instead, as a source of vacant properties where he might be able to throw down a sleeping bag. He’d make sure to park down the block, out of view, and sneak in after dark, relying on a real-estate agent’s habit of leaving a key somewhere obvious: under the doormat, beneath a flowerpot, behind a shutter. Looking back, he likes to think he was honing his survival instinct.

Dickey reconciled with his mother several years ago, and they have dinner together frequently. “We’re real close,” he told me. She’s the only person he sees regularly who still calls him by his given name, Robert Allen. His relationship with his father, however, remains “very superficial.” In spite of his stated wish, in “Wherever I Wind Up,” that writing about his childhood would bring them closer, he has received no acknowledgment that his father ever read the book. “He has to know it exists, and what’s talked about sensitively in it,” Dickey went on. “You would think it would be, like, ‘I’m sorry for what happened to you.’ But I don’t know if he is really ready to go there or not.”

If Dickey is correct in his presumption, then his father’s reluctance to discuss the abuse and its lingering effects is not atypical of a certain strain of male culture that Dickey hopes to change by continuing to talk about his struggles. “It’s still kind of a pretty taboo big-boys-don’t-go-there thing,” Dickey said, and mentioned that only three or four of his Mets teammates had asked him about it. “I think the perception is that once you go to therapy, and once you admit that this has happened to you, that you get to the other side of it.”

The writer in Dickey now finds himself wondering about his father’s “real story,” as he put it. “I know the legend from my father,” he said. “But I don’t know what it was really like for him, growing up where he did, and what he had to do. You hear, ‘I walked four miles, round trip, in the snow with no shoes.’ I mean, you just never know what’s authentic.” Harry Lee Dickey, according to the legend, at least, was a star ballplayer in his own right, nicknamed Horse, who, in 1974, received an offer of two thousand dollars and a bus ticket to join the Cincinnati Reds’ farm team in Plant City, Florida. He never went. That was the year his son was born.

The drive home from Dickey’s kids’ school passed through the prosperous neighborhood of Belle Meade, featuring old plantations and horse farms, and Dickey, who grew up a few miles to the east, still viewed it with an outsider’s amazement. “Generational wealth,” he explained, gesturing at grand Colonials on a hilly cul-de-sac. “Great-great-grandfather-passed-down, stuff like that.” Dickey’s wife, Anne, grew up in Belle Meade. He met her when he was in seventh grade, on scholarship at the tony Montgomery Bell Academy—Momma’s Boy Academy, to its rivals. She was the younger sister of his best friend, Bo Bartholomew, who introduced him to Christianity. Their mother was Miss Tennessee in 1966, and a runner-up for Miss America. Their father was a partner in a prominent law firm and a recipient of the governor’s Outstanding Tennessean award. Anne went to Davidson, in North Carolina, and then transferred to be with Dickey at the University of Tennessee, where she graduated at the top of her class. Five hundred people attended the Dickey-Bartholomew wedding, in 1997, including Lamar Alexander, the onetime Republican Presidential candidate.

They were the envy of all their friends, at least for a while: the star athlete and the smart country-club girl. “It was sort of transient, but you were really united with a community of people,” Anne told me, of their early minor-league days, when it was still possible to foresee a future according to the more familiar script. “Everybody would live in the same apartment complex and give each other rides.” Anne subsidized the baseball dream by taking jobs as a sales clerk at The Limited and teaching aerobics to senior citizens. But as Dickey’s progress stalled, during their late twenties, when they started having children, their contrasting backgrounds became a source of tension. “My dad always was, like, ‘You need to finish school, R.A.,’ ” she said. “That was his big thing, every off-season. And he’d always have job ideas.” Meanwhile, Anne’s friends back home started making real money, and she was stuck with the guy whose greatest professional achievement was having been forgiven for testing positive for opiates, while pitching in Oklahoma City, in 2000, because he’d eaten too many poppy seeds in a casserole baked by the wife of the team chaplain.

Anne Dickey is blond and athletic, attractive without striving to be glamorous. She offered me a selection of teas that she’d confiscated from the Mets’ road-trip hotels—a habit instilled during tougher times—and we sat at the dining-room table in the well-appointed faded-brick house that they moved into last fall. R.A. went off to the gym, and she talked, while keeping an eye on Van, their fourth child, as he attempted to make a Baby Jesus figurine drive a talking truck. “For some reason, I thought that a really good, successful year might bring some predictability,” she said. “You know, we might actually know where the grocery is when we get somewhere.” She sighed. “No, it’s just more adventure.” The previous day, she’d answered the doorbell in her bathrobe, and found a dozen members of the Canadian press, whom she entertained for two hours before the newest Blue Jay returned from showing me the formerly abandoned houses he’d once slept in as a teen. “It’ll be great, and I’m not complaining,” she went on. “It’s just—it’s hard to explain to non-baseball people.

“I’m going to write a book one day called ‘Home Sweet Rental Home,’ about all the ridiculous things we’ve been through,” Anne continued, and added that it would be comic rather than earnest and searching, like her husband’s. It would include details like the fact that Van had been conceived during the All-Star break, in 2010—“and guess when I was due?” she asked. “Opening Day!”

That year, 2010, marked the turning point in Dickey’s redemption narrative. He was the first player cut from the Mets’ spring-training camp, and learned, upon arriving at the club’s minor-league complex, that his diminished status would require him to lose his beard, in keeping with organizational policy. (“It made us so mad,” Anne said.) Thirty-five and clean-shaven for the first time in seven years, he reported to Buffalo, where he rented an apartment above a garage. A couple of weeks later, while he was pitching in front of three hundred people in frigid Lake Erie air, his knuckleballs started “dropping like rocks in a pond,” as he wrote, and he came within one batter of a perfect game. Summoned shortly thereafter to Queens, he’d been a mainstay in the Mets’ rotation ever since.

Anne wondered if Dickey had told me about the “great flood of Nashville,” in May of 2010, the month that he got called up. He hadn’t. “It just was one more example of something that was kind of stressful having to do alone, not knowing what the plan was, you know?” she said, and described staying up all night, putting gas in a sump pump, to little avail, as the rising water warped floorboards and compromised the furnace and the air-conditioning ducts. She didn’t know then if they could afford to renovate. Anne’s narrative had a snowballing momentum that was unimpeded by Dickey’s professional resurrection. It also included the head lice that her older children got while their father was away in Africa, scaling Kilimanjaro, and Van’s frequent sickness, which she attributed to mold in the house they rented in Manhasset, near Citi Field. Last summer, while R.A. was in the middle of a forty-four-inning streak without allowing an earned run, their nanny quit, and Anne and the kids moved in with her parents. And then there were the multiplying bunnies in a hutch out back, named for “Star Wars” characters. (Dickey has a decal of Darth Vader’s chest on the back of his iPhone.) “We didn’t mean to have all these rabbits!” she said, laughing. Anne estimated that R.A. had spoken to twenty church and school groups since his Cy Young season had finished (“and he’s probably got ten more lined up”), and it occurred to me that the Mets might not have been alone in hoping that their onetime ace would learn the simple pleasures of hurrying up and waiting.

Dickey’s literary efforts made Anne uneasy at first, not just the sexual-abuse revelations but also his depiction of their marriage, which included a confession of infidelity. “You know, in the South, people gossip so much,” she said, but then added that she’d come to find it freeing. “Now it’s all out there. So if they were talking about me, they may as well read about me.” Lately, she’d been on the receiving end of a kind of apology tour from friends who had advised her long ago to give R.A. an ultimatum about his foundering career. One old friend told her, “He’s just finally getting paid for all these years you went through hell for baseball and nobody gave a crap.”

Success hadn’t altered Dickey’s frugality, and Anne asked me not to mind the forlorn-looking Christmas trees in the living room. “I’m like, ‘You know, I like the eight-foot Fraser fir,’ ” she recalled, of their recent trip to a tree farm run by the Boy Scouts. “He’s like, ‘No, no. Kids, come on, we’re going to find the most pitiful tree that nobody wants.’ And I’m rolling my eyes—like, why does everything have to be so thought through and moral? I mean, just get a Christmas tree! ‘No, we’re not buying into commercialism.’ We spent an hour and a half walking around and feeling sorry for trees.” Anne added, “He doesn’t worry about appearances or what other people think. I admire that in him, because I don’t carry that same confidence.”

Dickey’s mastery of the knuckleball came with help from a few of the handful of living people capable of offering it, and his jerky delivery now could be described as a composite of his predecessors’. From the Hall of Famer Phil Niekro, also known as Knucksie, Dickey learned to fire his hips toward home plate. (Without this, the pitch is “lazy,” Knucksie says.) Charlie Hough, the leathery ex-Dodger and Ranger, taught him his grip, with his fingernails pinching just below the horseshoe bend in the seams. Tim Wakefield advised him always to be conscious of his follow-through—to imagine reaching down for his athletic cup after every release. Yet the velocity of Dickey’s knuckleball, which can arrive almost as quickly as a slider, is unique, and helps explain the uncanny control he now seems to exert over a pitch that’s notorious for being uncontrollable. In the past three seasons, with the Mets, he walked slightly more than two batters per nine innings, a rate that placed him among the National League’s best.

“It doesn’t have as much time to flutter out of the zone,” Dickey says, shrugging off his precision. “On a good day, I might try to make it swing and dart in a certain direction. Maybe I can make it knuckle and go down and in to a righty, or I get on the outside of it a little bit—sweep it away from a righty. On good days, maybe I can do that, but that’s not normal.” Normally, he doesn’t concern himself with lateral movement or placement. “I only think about height,” he says. He tries to fix in his sight a location two or three baseballs’ width above his catcher’s mask, and aims to release the ball there, straight down the plate, imparting perhaps a quarter revolution of spin, with the expectation that eighty per cent of the time the ball will dive into the zone at the last second—to the left, or the right, who knows?

A connoisseur, armed with a radar gun, might detect a couple of gears in Dickey’s knuckleball, with the overdrive majority approaching and sometimes exceeding eighty miles per hour and a downshifted cluster settling in the lower seventies. Often, this disparity is intentional—a bit of guile in what is otherwise an art of repetition and playing the odds. “I’m working on how I can change speeds more effectively with it,” he explains. “A lot of times, I’ll throw the seventy-four-mile-per-hour one and think that I’ve thrown the eighty, or I’ll throw the eighty and think that I’ve thrown the seventy-four. Just the feel of that takes time.”

Improbably, Dickey has one of the best fastballs in the majors. It clocks in at around eighty-three, scarcely faster than his most biting knuckler, and is so often taken for a called strike that it more than makes up for the ease with which a decent high-school player could drive it into the gap, if he only knew to swing. Last year, Dickey threw about five hundred sort-of fastballs, and only twenty per cent of them came when they might most have been expected—when he was behind, deep in the count. The most common occurrence, by far, was on the first pitch of an at-bat. His fastball is a tease, used to unnerve opponents over a missed opportunity rather than to reassure an anxious catcher. It produces strikes with considerably greater efficiency than the average big-league heater—or, at least, it did, when used judiciously, and before his scouting report was made public.

Like all knuckleballers, Dickey is meticulous about his nails, taking calcium supplements and travelling with a customized manicuring kit. In an emergency, he is not above using acrylic; he once visited a place called Pink Nails, in Queens. He has also come to be particular about baseballs themselves. Last August, while facing the Colorado Rockies first baseman Tyler Colvin, he noticed a scuff on the game ball, and, instead of seeking a replacement from the umpire, figured he might benefit from the added aerodynamic disruption. Colvin crushed a game-tying home run, and Dickey hasn’t settled for anything other than a pristine ball since.

His superstitions aren’t especially onerous. Forty-five minutes before taking the mound, Dickey likes to hop in the Jacuzzi for eight or nine minutes. Then he takes a shower—a ritual cleansing before putting on his uniform—and begins to narrow his mental focus. Up until his shower, he welcomes small talk, unlike many starters, who treat game day like an extended meditation. But he will warm up only with the bullpen catcher, and that goes for his days off as well. This, too, he learned the hard way. During a short-lived stint with the Minnesota Twins, in 2009, he befriended the All-Star closer Joe Nathan, and they became throwing partners. Internalizing his comparatively j.v. status, he feared making Nathan chase after uncatchable knuckleballs, and wasted too much time throwing conventionally. His knuckles lost their mojo. What good is a manicure if you can’t show it off?

While riding in the car with Dickey, I picked up what looked like an ordinary baseball card that was resting on the console by the transmission. The name and picture on the front of the card were unfamiliar to me. “Oh, man, that’s a story,” Dickey began, and flicked his wrist against my arm, commanding my full attention. “So, I don’t know that guy. He’s from Nashville, teaches at a place called Grassland. Diehard Mets fan—just loves the Mets. Had a tough upbringing, really well-respected teacher in the community. On his way back from a field trip: died, sitting on the bus. Suddenly. A mutual friend contacted me and asked if I would drop by the wake or the visitation. ‘Oh, my gosh. Really? I don’t know these people. That’s kind of awkward.’ Anyway, I feel God saying, ‘Go ahead and do this.’ So I did—went over there unannounced and walked into the visitation. And when I stepped in there, and it registered with the wife and aunt and uncle who I was, they just started, like, bawling, weeping, and I was just in a place where I felt this need to console her. It just was really overwhelming. I’d never been in a situation like that. I wrote her a letter and handed it to her and gave her a hug. Not being a fan, and not being enamored, whatever, it’s hard for me to realize how much that may or may not have meant. But they were passing these cards out . . .”

Dickey has a natural social ease, a gift for reading audiences and adjusting his register to suit the situation. Having spent some time alone with him, as he mused introspectively, I was surprised when, after parking his car, he slipped seamlessly into the rhythms of jock culture. He’d arrived at a facility called D1 Sports Training, which was run by his brother-in-law Will Bartholomew. Dickey’s off-season regimen for keeping his arm in shape included throwing footballs to some of Bartholomew’s clients as they prepared for the N.F.L. Combine. The in-laws greeted one another with a broad-shouldered hug that gave way to a handshake, a snap, and a fist bump. “Blue Jays, baby!” Bartholomew said.

“They got nice unis,” Dickey said.

“They got sweet unis!”

Dickey alluded to Toronto’s Rogers Centre, a.k.a. the SkyDome, which offered the prospect of climate control, a boon for knuckleballers, whose effectiveness is more threatened by wind conditions than other pitchers’. “Oh, yeah, baby!” Bartholomew said. “Shredding ’em. Hoo-wee!”

Two minor-league baseball players were lifting weights, and Dickey introduced himself, asking questions about their backgrounds and attempting to guess the names of their respective farm teams, based on their big-league affiliations. “I’ll be around, so if you need me, lean on me,” he said, leaving them with admiring smiles as he grabbed a football and warmed up, preparing to relive his quarterback days.

The next time I saw Dickey, after leaving Nashville, he asked me if I’d had a chance to watch the trailer for the new “Gatsby” movie, starring Leonardo DiCaprio. He was standing by his locker in the Blue Jays’ spring-training clubhouse, in Dunedin, Florida, where I noticed an overturned copy of “This Boy’s Life,” Tobias Wolff’s memoir of surviving a harsh upbringing. He mentioned that it had been recommended by the novelist Ann Patchett, whom he met at her independent bookstore, in Nashville.

Dickey had been absent from Dunedin for a couple of weeks, while participating in the World Baseball Classic, and the Toronto scribes were still getting used to his verbal presence. One told me that he’d read Dickey’s book over the winter, as a primer, and was amazed to discover that Dickey sounded even more articulate when sweating, after workouts, than on the page. It was almost as though Wayne Coffey, the veteran sportswriter, who helped Dickey shape the book, had reined him in, at times, to fit the genre. During his first media scrum of the spring, Dickey used the words “purview” and “correlation” in short order.

Dickey was surprised by the extent of the Dunedin media presence, and by the seeming lack of jadedness about the particulars of his story. “It’s almost like going to another planet,” he said, and, apologizing for employing a Canadian stereotype, characterized his new interlocutors as “very polite.” He added, “A lot of their headlines really reflect what the story is, rather than having nothing to do with the story.”

“We may not be obnoxious, but we will be demanding,” the radio host Mike Wilner told me, sounding a little defensive, when I relayed Dickey’s initial impression. The acquisition of Dickey, and of several Miami Marlins, including the ex-Met Jose Reyes, in a firesale by the miserly Marlins owner, Jeffrey Loria, over the winter, had Toronto feeling like a big-league baseball town again, with expectations higher than they’d been in twenty years, since the World Series heroics of Joe Carter. Better still, the improvements in the Jays’ roster had coincided with off-season turmoil afflicting the Red Sox and the Yankees, the traditional bullies of the American League East. (Overheard in the press cafeteria: “I never thought I’d be saying this, but I actually feel sorry for the Yankees.”) Wilner told me that the Blue Jays’ pre-season coverage was starting to eat into the Maple Leafs’ airtime back home. As Canada’s only baseball team, the Jays represented thirty million people, and Dickey, with his social-justice message, was poised to become an adopted national hero. “So many non-sports outlets want a piece of him,” Wilner said. “I hope it’s not too much that the club shuts him down.”

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Before signing his extension with the Blue Jays, Dickey met with the team’s G.M., Alex Anthopoulos, and the manager, John Gibbons, warning them of his extracurricular interests and commitments: “That’s part of who I am.” The paperback edition of “Wherever I Wind Up” was due out soon, with an afterword in which he apologized for asserting, in the book’s third sentence, that he would never lead the league in strikeouts. (His two hundred and thirty K’s were tops in the N.L. last year.) So, too, was a young-adult-readers’ edition, which he’d need to be promoting, and he’d submitted a first draft of a children’s book, “Knuckleball Ned,” to Dial, a Penguin imprint. After news of the trade broke, the Royal Ontario Museum, in Toronto, got in touch to discuss cultural-outreach opportunities. Dickey was pleased by what he was learning about his new city’s diversity, too. “I read that Toronto is only fifty-one-per-cent Canadian,” he said. “In some ways, Toronto is like a New York.”

New York would soon have a new pitching sensation to fawn over, in Matt Harvey, perhaps the second coming of Tom Seaver, but the Mets seemed to be taking measures to preëmpt knuckleball nostalgia before Opening Day. Jay Horwitz, the team’s longtime publicity director, tweeted about “the last Mets pitcher to win 20 games,” referring not to Dickey but to Frank Viola, who accomplished the feat in 1990. Dickey said that he found the apparent amnesia “humorous,” and added that Horwitz had since called him to apologize.

Playing catch in the Florida sun, wearing his uniform baggy and belted high in the waist, with stirrups up to his knees, Dickey looked more like a contemporary of Cy Young himself than like a modern ace. Batting practice began, and he drifted around the outfield, shagging flies and pausing at one point to bend over and pick up a feather on the grass. The sensation of watching someone who’d stepped out of a time machine, or a children’s book, was amplified when he stuck the feather in the top of his cap, and continued roaming the outfield as if nothing were out of the ordinary.

Dickey was still wearing the feather when he returned to the clubhouse, almost an hour later. “It fell down right in front of me, from what I like to imagine as the outstretched wing of an osprey,” he said, and presented it to me, for inspection. “I do think it was an osprey. Probably with a fish in its talons.”

John Gibbons, when I spoke with him in his office later, seemed happy to let Dickey be Dickey. “Most of us in this game, we come here, we’re in the entertainment business,” he said. “We do baseball, and we might do a thing or two on the side. But he’s a special guy. That’s where his heart is. God bless him.” Trying to think of comparably cerebral players he’d known, Gibbons brought up the Dominican pitcher Miguel Batista, whom he’d managed in an earlier stint with the Blue Jays, back in 2004 and 2005. “Miguel wrote a book—I think it was on a serial killer, or something,” he said. The book’s English title was “The Avenger of Blood.”

Gibbons professed his belief in the phenomenon sometimes known as the “day-after effect,” or, more recently, the Dickey effect: a knuckleball hangover that leaves batters disoriented when returning to face conventional pitchers the next day. “We’d face Wakefield, and he could set you back a couple days,” Gibbons said, recalling the frustration of managing against Boston. “You’re chasing that thing, and the timing’s off.” Mets pitchers who followed Dickey in the rotation last year had even more success than Dickey, and Gibbons, hoping to benefit from a similar bump, had chosen the hard-throwing Brandon Morrow to fill the second slot in his rotation, for maximal contrast.

Dickey wasn’t around when the TV in the clubhouse, tuned to the Canadian station Sportsnet, began airing a half-hour-long documentary about him. “Are you kidding?” one Blue Jay exclaimed as he passed by. “Every time I look up, it’s R. A. Dickey.” He turned to the veteran reliever Darren Oliver, who, at forty-two, is the only pitcher on the staff older than Dickey, and asked, “You see this?” Oliver looked up from his phone to see a closeup of Dickey’s bearded face in a hangdog expression, as he talked about his efforts to raise awareness of sexual abuse. “Look at him, trying to be all serious,” Oliver said.

Dickey’s closest friend on the team, the catcher and fellow-Nashville resident J. P. Arencibia, told me that he hadn’t discussed Dickey’s troubled past with him. “I just think that people understand that he has a book,” Arencibia said. “I mean, I’m sure he’s open to talk about it, but it’s not something that you talk about all the time.” Arencibia added, “He’s way different than everybody else. Great guy, though.” ♦

Ben McGrath began working at The New Yorker in 1999, and has been a staff writer since 2003.